To the Editor:
I can quite understand Mr. Lurie’s discomfiture at the tone of my article. He was, after all, one of the central actors in the events described.
It is interesting to learn, from the letter, that Mr. Lurie and his partisans agree with me “on the nature of voluntary association” and that they did not intend, in reconstructing the NCRAC, to create a body strong enough to impose discipline within its own ranks. No doubt such assurances are made in good faith. Alas, all too few of us are capable of understanding the motives for our own actions, or in the heat of debate, of estimating dispassionately the consequences of the plans we propose. That is why the wisest of us, under those circumstances, find it helpful to regard a given measure against the background of the past that brought it forth. It was the purpose of my article to supply such a historical background for the present controversy.
I do not find that Mr. Lurie’s letter questions either the facts or the interpretations in my account of the past. Where the hurt comes is in the conclusion that the actions of today fit into a pattern discernible from the past. But if the shoe nevertheless fits, Mr. Lurie would do well to wonder whether his own bias does not keep him from seeing the bunion on his toe.
He will thus find it helpful to reconsider two points in his letter. Mr. Lurie agrees with me that the effectiveness of the work it does ought to be the basis of our judgment of any organization. It was not, of course, the purpose of my article to attempt such a judgment of any of the agencies. But that was the task of the Maclver Report and that was the obligation of the NCRAC in evaluating the Report. I have read the available material as diligently as I could. I cannot find that either Professor Maclver or the NCRAC made any effort whatsoever—much less one deserving serious scholarly attention—to assess the effectiveness of the agencies involved. Would Mr. Lurie venture to assert, for example, that veterans’ affairs were allocated to the JWV, or religious affairs to the UAHC on the basis of a judgment of the effectiveness of the work of those organizations in the fields in question?
Or again, is Mr. Lurie really unaware how meaningless it is to think of majority rule as a simple standard for conduct for a voluntary association? In the case of a university, hospital, or church, the majority of whom shall rules—students, faculty or trustees, patients, doctors, or directors? And in what way can Harvard, Yale, and Columbia associate themselves to arrive at decisions binding upon Princeton? Indeed, no more can be said than that, in some institutions, in some cases, for some purposes, the majority of some group makes decisions. But which institutions, which cases, which group is not determined by abstract ideological assumption, but rather by a practical process that adjusts these forms to the real needs of the members of the organization.
We may pass charitably over such strange statements as that in which Mr. Lurie compares the Anglo-Jewish and Yiddish press to the Chicago Tribune and the Daily Worker. Mr. Lurie is a busy man, occupied with the practical necessities of his own very important job. Only he would do well to wonder whether those necessities may not have committed him to a course ultimately injurious to the interests of American Jews.
Oscar Handlin
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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